fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe magnificence"--proves
how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had learned to string up
his loose chords. There is nothing maudlin in _Hyperion_; all there is
in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as sublime as Aeschylus," said
Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, and something of modern
sweetness interfused.

Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was
apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin but
not Greek. He, who of all the English poets had the most purely Hellenic
spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the
medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular
mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British
Museum. His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's
Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his
sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same
inspiration are his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin
Marbles_, _On a Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on
a Grecian Urn_. But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the
blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute"
had her part in him, as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he
had read the _Faerie Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of
Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto.
The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the
Pot of Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La
Belle Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of St. Agnes_,
with its wealth of mediaeval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode
to a Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the
warmer hues of romance.

There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must
die

Before high-piled books in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.

His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance